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Xft Support For Mozilla

Posted by timothy on from the one-order-of-augmented-lizard dept.

keithp writes "The results of a few short hours of hacking by blizzard (with a bit of help from me) can be seen here." According to Keith, "The hope is to have a patch of less than 100 lines; currently it's more like 400 lines. ... The patch uses a new version of the Xft library available at http://keithp.com. That will be integrated into the XFree86 CVS tree after 4.2 stablizes; the existing Xft library will remain in place for backwards compatibility. One feature of the new library is that it works with older X servers that don't have the Render extension, providing AA text (including the LCD optimizations) for any screen with a TrueColor visual." Chris Blizzard provided a link to the patch itself, as it stands right now.

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Already possible, sourt of. by foonf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Look here. This is with the version of mozilla included in Debian unstable, patched to work with the gdkxft hack. The real question is will this new patch actually be included in any commonly distributed Mozilla binaries. Because if it isn't, I don't think many are going to recompile the whole damn thing just for anti-aliasing (but that won't stop people from complaining about the lack of it!).

    --

    "(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
  2. Re:Lets get some facts straight first. by Graff · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Microsoft distributes the base true type fonts at no cost, in fact they either invented or popularized the (usually inexpensive) true type font system to compete with expensive fonts from other vendors.

    Well, actually Microsoft only agreed to use TrueType when it came out. It was actually developed by Apple. They developed it for Windows and Macintosh in order to combat Adobe's strangle hold on the market. Here's an intresting quote on Microsoft's site on TrueType:
    The TrueType digital font format was originally designed by Apple Computer, Inc. It was a means of avoiding per-font royalty payments to the owners of other font technologies, and a solution to some of the technical limitations of Adobe's Type 1 format.

    You can see a pretty detailed history of TrueType on this web page.

    --
    Sapere aude!
  3. Re:Gdkxft has had this for a while by matman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well it's not too bad. Xwindows supports a generic interface for rendering things that are accelerated by hardware (falling back to software when need be). Now, please, if I'm wrong, someone correct me, but I believe that it works like this: XFT is an API for drawing fonts in XWindows - it replaces X's old font interface. XFT talks to freetype to turn a string into a vector image (font file) into a bitmap image. The bitmap image that freetype produces can either be a monochrome pixmap (what normal X font routines use) or a 256 colour pixmap with antialiasing). XFT takes the 256 colour (greyscale) image and gives it an alpha channel (through some kind of an operation like multiply or darken only in GIMP. It then passes this image to XRender to have it rendered on the screen. Right now, most QT or GTK apps use QT and GTK font rendering routines. These routines used to use the normal x font stuff... if you patch them to use XFT, they all get anti-aliasing. Mozilla has it's own widget set, so it needs it's own patch to use the better font rendering mechanisms.

    The font support is in the right place, it's just that applications need to be changed to use the new, better interface, instead of the old interface that can't do hardware accelerated alpha channel stuff.